Cousin Pons

Although a certain amount of repetition is inevitable in a canvas so considerable and so full of detail as a complete picture of French society in the nineteenth century, it is needless to repeat the description of Mme. Fontaine’s den, already given in Les Comediens sans le savoir; suffice it to say that Mme. Cibot used to go to Mme. Fontaine’s house in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple as regularly as frequenters of the Cafe Anglais drop in at that restaurant for lunch.  Mme. Cibot, being a very old customer, often introduced young persons and old gossips consumed with curiosity to the wise woman.

The old servant who acted as provost marshal flung open the door of the sanctuary with no further ceremony than the remark, “It’s Mme. Cibot.—­Come in, there’s nobody here.”

“Well, child, what can bring you here so early of a morning?” asked the sorceress, as Mme. Fontaine might well be called, for she was seventy-eight years old, and looked like one of the Parcae.

“Something has given me a turn,” said La Cibot; “I want the grand jeu; it is a question of my fortune.”  Therewith she explained her position, and wished to know if her sordid hopes were likely to be realized.

“Do you know what the grand jeu means?” asked Mme. Fontaine, with much solemnity.

“No, I haven’t never seen the trick, I am not rich enough.—­A hundred francs!  It’s not as if it cost so much!  Where was the money to come from?  But now I can’t help myself, I must have it.”

“I don’t do it often, child,” returned Mme. Fontaine; “I only do it for rich people on great occasions, and they pay me twenty-five louis for doing it; it tires me, you see, it wears me out.  The ‘Spirit’ rives my inside, here.  It is like going to the ‘Sabbath,’ as they used to say.”

“But when I tell you that it means my whole future, my dear good Ma’am Fontaine—­”

“Well, as it is you that have come to consult me so often, I will submit myself to the Spirit!” replied Mme. Fontaine, with a look of genuine terror on her face.

She rose from her filthy old chair by the fireside, and went to a table covered with a green cloth so worn that you could count the threads.  A huge toad sat dozing there beside a cage inhabited by a black disheveled-looking fowl.

“Astaroth! here, my son!” she said, and the creature looked up intelligently at her as she rapped him on the back with a long knitting-needle.—­“And you, Mademoiselle Cleopatre” she continued, tapping the ancient fowl on the beak.

Then Mme. Fontaine began to think; for several seconds she did not move; she looked like a corpse, her eyes rolled in their sockets and grew white; then she rose stiff and erect, and a cavernous voice cried: 

“Here I am!”

Automatically she scattered millet for Cleopatre, took up the pack of cards, shuffled them convulsively, and held them out to Mme. Cibot to cut, sighing heavily all the time.  At the sight of that image of Death in the filthy turban and uncanny-looking bed-jacket, watching the black fowl as it pecked at the millet-grains, calling to the toad Astaroth to walk over the cards that lay out on the table, a cold thrill ran through Mme. Cibot; she shuddered.  Nothing but strong belief can give strong emotions.  An assured income, to be or not to be, that was the question.

The sorceress opened a magical work and muttered some unintelligible words in a sepulchral voice, looked at the remaining millet-seeds, and watched the way in which the toad retired.  Then after seven or eight minutes, she turned her white eyes on the cards and expounded them.

“You will succeed, although nothing in the affair will fall out as you expect.  You will have many steps to take, but you will reap the fruits of your labors.  You will behave very badly; it will be with you as it is with all those who sit by a sick-bed and covet part of the inheritance.  Great people will help you in this work of wrongdoing.  Afterwards in the death agony you will repent.  Two escaped convicts, a short man with red hair and an old man with a bald head, will murder you for the sake of the money you will be supposed to have in the village whither you will retire with your second husband.  Now, my daughter, it is still open to you to choose your course.”

The excitement which seemed to glow within, lighting up the bony hollows about the eyes, was suddenly extinguished.  As soon as the horoscope was pronounced, Mme. Fontaine’s face wore a dazed expression; she looked exactly like a sleep-walker aroused from sleep, gazed about her with an astonished air, recognized Mme. Cibot, and seemed surprised by her terrified face.

“Well, child,” she said, in a totally different voice, “are you satisfied?”

Mme. Cibot stared stupidly at the sorceress, and could not answer.

“Ah! you would have the grand jeu; I have treated you as an old acquaintance.  I only want a hundred francs—­”

“Cibot,—­going to die?” gasped the portress.

“So I have been telling you very dreadful things, have I?” asked Mme. Fontaine, with an extremely ingenuous air.

“Why, yes!” said La Cibot, taking a hundred francs from her pocket and laying them down on the edge of the table.  “Going to be murdered, think of it—­”

“Ah! there it is!  You would have the grand jeu; but don’t take on so, all the folk that are murdered on the cards don’t die.”

“But is it possible, Ma’am Fontaine?”

“Oh, I know nothing about it, my pretty dear!  You would rap at the door of the future; I pull the cord, and it came.”

“It, what?” asked Mme. Cibot.

“Well, then, the Spirit!” cried the sorceress impatiently.

“Good-bye, Ma’am Fontaine,” exclaimed the portress.  “I did not know what the grand jeu was like.  You have given me a good fright, that you have.”

“The mistress will not put herself in that state twice in a month,” said the servant, as she went with La Cibot to the landing.  “She would do herself to death if she did, it tires her so.  She will eat cutlets now and sleep for three hours afterwards.”

Out in the street La Cibot took counsel of herself as she went along, and, after the manner of all who ask for advice of any sort or description, she took the favorable part of the prediction and rejected the rest.  The next day found her confirmed in her resolutions —­she would set all in train to become rich by securing a part of Pons’ collection.  Nor for some time had she any other thought than the combination of various plans to this end.  The faculty of self-concentration seen in rough, uneducated persons, explained on a previous page, the reserve power accumulated in those whose mental energies are unworn by the daily wear and tear of social life, and brought into action so soon as that terrible weapon the “fixed idea” is brought into play,—­all this was pre-eminently manifested in La Cibot.  Even as the “fixed idea” works miracles of evasion, and brings forth prodigies of sentiment, so greed transformed the portress till she became as formidable as a Nucingen at bay, as subtle beneath her seeming stupidity as the irresistible La Palferine.

About seven o’clock one morning, a few days afterwards, she saw Remonencq taking down his shutters.  She went across to him.

“How could one find out how much the things yonder in my gentlemen’s rooms are worth?” she asked in a wheedling tone.

“Oh! that is quite easy,” replied the owner of the old curiosity shop.  “If you will play fair and above board with me, I will tell you of somebody, a very honest man, who will know the value of the pictures to a farthing—­”

“Who?”

“M.  Magus, a Jew.  He only does business to amuse himself now.”

Elie Magus has appeared so often in the Comedie Humaine, that it is needless to say more of him here.  Suffice it to add that he had retired from business, and as a dealer was following the example set by Pons the amateur.  Well-known valuers like Henry, Messrs. Pigeot and Moret, Theret, Georges, and Roehn, the experts of the Musee, in fact, were but children compared with Elie Magus.  He could see a masterpiece beneath the accumulated grime of a century; he knew all schools, and the handwriting of all painters.

He had come to Paris from Bordeaux, and so long ago as 1835 he had retired from business without making any change for the better in his dress, so faithful is the race to old tradition.  The persecutions of the Middle Ages compelled them to wear rags, to snuffle and whine and groan over their poverty in self-defence, till the habits induced by the necessities of other times have come to be, as usual, instinctive, a racial defect.

Elie Magus had amassed a vast fortune by buying and selling diamonds, pictures, lace, enamels, delicate carvings, old jewelry, and rarities of all kinds, a kind of commerce which has developed enormously of late, so much so indeed that the number of dealers has increased tenfold during the last twenty years in this city of Paris, whither all the curiosities in the world come to rub against one another.  And for pictures there are but three marts in the world—­Rome, London, and Paris.

Elie Magus lived in the Chausee des Minimes, a short, broad street leading to the Place Royale.  He had bought the house, an old-fashioned mansion, for a song, as the saying is, in 1831.  Yet there were sumptuous apartments within it, decorated in the time of Louis XV.; for it had once been the Hotel Maulaincourt, built by the great President of the Cour des Aides, and its remote position had saved it at the time of the Revolution.

You may be quite sure that the old Jew had sound reasons for buying house property, contrary to the Hebrew law and custom.  He had ended, as most of us end, with a hobby that bordered on a craze.  He was as miserly as his friend, the late lamented Gobseck; but he had been caught by the snare of the eyes, by the beauty of the pictures in which he dealt.  As his taste grew more and more fastidious, it became one of the passions which princes alone can indulge when they are wealthy and art-lovers.  As the second King of Prussia found nothing that so kindled enthusiasm as the spectacle of a grenadier over six feet high, and gave extravagant sums for a new specimen to add to his living museum of a regiment, so the retired picture-dealer was roused to passion-pitch only by some canvas in perfect preservation, untouched since the master laid down the brush; and what was more, it must be a picture of the painter’s best time.  No great sales, therefore, took place but Elie Magus was there; every mart knew him; he traveled all over Europe.  The ice-cold, money-worshiping soul in him kindled at the sight of a perfect work of art, precisely as a libertine, weary of fair women, is roused from apathy by the sight of a beautiful girl, and sets out afresh upon the quest of flawless loveliness.  A Don Juan among fair works of art, a worshiper of the Ideal, Elie Magus had discovered joys that transcend the pleasure of a miser gloating over his gold—­he lived in a seraglio of great paintings.

His masterpieces were housed as became the children of princes; the whole first floor of the great old mansion was given up to them.  The rooms had been restored under Elie Magus’ orders, and with what magnificence!

The windows were hung with the richest Venetian brocade; the most splendid carpets from the Savonnerie covered the parquetry flooring.  The frames of the pictures, nearly a hundred in number, were magnificent specimens, regilded cunningly by Servais, the one gilder in Paris whom Elie Magus thought sufficiently painstaking; the old Jew himself had taught him to use the English leaf, which is infinitely superior to that produced by French gold-beaters.  Servais is among gilders as Thouvenin among bookbinders—­an artist among craftsmen, making his work a labor of love.  Every window in that gallery was protected by iron-barred shutters.  Elie Magus himself lived in a couple of attics on the floor above; the furniture was wretched, the rooms were full of rags, and the whole place smacked of the Ghetto; Elie Magus was finishing his days without any change in his life.

The whole of the ground floor was given up to the picture trade (for the Jew still dealt in works of art).  Here he stored his canvases, here also packing-cases were stowed on their arrival from other countries; and still there was room for a vast studio, where Moret, most skilful of restorers of pictures, a craftsman whom the Musee ought to employ, was almost always at work for Magus.  The rest of the rooms on the ground floor were given up to Magus’ daughter, the child of his old age, a Jewess as beautiful as a Jewess can be when the Semitic type reappears in its purity and nobility in a daughter of Israel.  Noemi was guarded by two servants, fanatical Jewesses, to say nothing of an advanced-guard, a Polish Jew, Abramko by name, once involved in a fabulous manner in political troubles, from which Elie Magus saved him as a business speculation.  Abramko, porter of the silent, grim, deserted mansion, divided his office and his lodge with three remarkably ferocious animals—­an English bull-dog, a Newfoundland dog, and another of the Pyrenean breed.

Behold the profound observations of human nature upon which Elie Magus based his feeling of security, for secure he felt; he left home without misgivings, slept with both ears shut, and feared no attempt upon his daughter (his chief treasure), his pictures, or his money.  In the first place, Abramko’s salary was increased every year by two hundred francs so long as his master should live; and Magus, moreover, was training Abramko as a money-lender in a small way.  Abramko never admitted anybody until he had surveyed them through a formidable grated opening.  He was a Hercules for strength, he worshiped Elie Magus, as Sancho Panza worshiped Don Quixote.  All day long the dogs were shut up without food; at nightfall Abramko let them loose; and by a cunning device the old Jew kept each animal at his post in the courtyard or the garden by hanging a piece of meat just out of reach on the top of a pole.  The animals guarded the house, and sheer hunger guarded the dogs.  No odor that reached their nostrils could tempt them from the neighborhood of that piece of meat; they would not have left their places at the foot of the poles for the most engaging female of the canine species.  If a stranger by any chance intruded, the dogs suspected him of ulterior designs upon their rations, which were only taken down in the morning by Abramko himself when he awoke.  The advantages of this fiendish scheme are patent.  The animals never barked, Magus’ ingenuity had made savages of them; they were treacherous as Mohicans.  And now for the result.

One night burglars, emboldened by the silence, decided too hastily that it would be easy enough to “clean out” the old Jew’s strong box.  One of their number told off to advance to the assault scrambled up the garden wall and prepared to descend.  This the bull-dog allowed him to do.  The animal, knowing perfectly well what was coming, waited for the burglar to reach the ground; but when that gentleman directed a kick at him, the bull-dog flew at the visitor’s shins, and, making but one bite of it, snapped the ankle-bone clean in two.  The thief had the courage to tear him away, and returned, walking upon the bare bone of the mutilated stump till he reached the rest of the gang, when he fell fainting, and they carried him off.  The Police News, of course, did not fail to report this delightful night incident, but no one believed in it.

Magus at this time was seventy-five years old, and there was no reason why he should not live to a hundred.  Rich man though he was, he lived like the Remonencqs.  His necessary expenses, including the money he lavished on his daughter, did not exceed three thousand francs.  No life could be more regular; the old man rose as soon as it was light, breakfasted on bread rubbed with a clove of garlic, and ate no more food until dinner-time.  Dinner, a meal frugal enough for a convent, he took at home.  All the forenoons he spent among his treasures, walking up and down the gallery where they hung in their glory.  He would dust everything himself, furniture and pictures; he never wearied of admiring.  Then he would go downstairs to his daughter, drink deep of a father’s happiness, and start out upon his walks through Paris, to attend sales or visit exhibitions and the like.

If Elie Magus found a great work of art under the right conditions, the discovery put new life into the man; here was a bit of sharp practice, a bargain to make, a battle of Marengo to win.  He would pile ruse on ruse to buy the new sultana as cheaply as possible.  Magus had a map of Europe on which all great pictures were marked; his co-religionists in every city spied out business for him, and received a commission on the purchase.  And then, what rewards for all his pains!  The two lost Raphaels so earnestly sought after by Raphael lovers are both in his collection.  Elie Magus owns the original portrait of Giorgione’s Mistress, the woman for whom the painter died; the so-called originals are merely copies of the famous picture, which is worth five hundred thousand francs, according to its owner’s estimation.  This Jew possesses Titian’s masterpiece, an Entombment painted for Charles V., sent by the great man to the great Emperor with a holograph letter, now fastened down upon the lower part of the canvas.  And Magus has yet another Titian, the original sketch from which all the portraits of Philip II. were painted.  His remaining ninety-seven pictures are all of the same rank and distinction.  Wherefore Magus laughs at our national collection, raked by the sunlight which destroys the fairest paintings, pouring in through panes of glass that act as lenses.  Picture galleries can only be lighted from above; Magus opens and closes his shutters himself; he is as careful of his pictures as of his daughter, his second idol.  And well the old picture-fancier knows the laws of the lives of pictures.  To hear him talk, a great picture has a life of its own; it is changeable, it takes its beauty from the color of the light.  Magus talks of his paintings as Dutch fanciers used to talk of their tulips; he will come home on purpose to see some one picture in the hour of its glory, when the light is bright and clean.

And Magus himself was a living picture among the motionless figures on the wall—­a little old man, dressed in a shabby overcoat, a silk waistcoat, renewed twice in a score of years, and a very dirty pair of trousers, with a bald head, a face full of deep hollows, a wrinkled, callous skin, a beard that had a trick of twitching its long white bristles, a menacing pointed chin, a toothless mouth, eyes bright as the eyes of his dogs in the yard, and a nose like an obelisk—­there he stood in his gallery smiling at the beauty called into being by genius.  A Jew surrounded by his millions will always be one of the finest spectacles which humanity can give.  Robert Medal, our great actor, cannot rise to this height of poetry, sublime though he is.

Paris of all the cities of the world holds most of such men as Magus, strange beings with a strange religion in their heart of hearts.  The London “eccentric” always finds that worship, like life, brings weariness and satiety in the end; the Parisian monomaniac lives cheerfully in concubinage with his crotchet to the last.

Often shall you meet in Paris some Pons, some Elie Magus, dressed badly enough, with his face turned from the rising sun (like the countenance of the perpetual secretary of the Academie), apparently heeding nothing, conscious of nothing, paying no attention to shop-windows nor to fair passers-by, walking at random, so to speak, with nothing in his pockets, and to all appearance an equally empty head.  Do you ask to what Parisian tribe this manner of man belongs?  He is a collector, a millionaire, one of the most impassioned souls upon earth; he and his like are capable of treading the miry ways that lead to the police-court if so they may gain possession of a cup, a picture, or some such rare unpublished piece as Elie Magus once picked up one memorable day in Germany.

This was the expert to whom Remonencq with much mystery conducted La Cibot.  Remonencq always asked advice of Elie Magus when he met him in the streets; and more than once Magus had lent him money through Abramko, knowing Remonencq’s honesty.  The Chaussee des Minimes is close to the Rue de Normandie, and the two fellow-conspirators reached the house in ten minutes.

“You will see the richest dealer in curiosities, the greatest connoisseur in Paris,” Remonencq had said.  And Mme. Cibot, therefore, was struck dumb with amazement to be confronted with a little old man in a great-coat too shabby for Cibot to mend, standing watching a painter at work upon an old picture in the chilly room on the vast ground floor.  The old man’s eyes, full of cold feline malignance, were turned upon her, and La Cibot shivered.

“What do you want, Remonencq?” asked this person.

“It is a question of valuing some pictures; there is nobody but you in Paris who can tell a poor tinker-fellow like me how much he may give when he has not thousands to spend, like you.”

“Where is it?”

“Here is the portress of the house where the gentleman lives; she does for him, and I have arranged with her—­”

“Who is the owner?”

“M.  Pons!” put in La Cibot.

“Don’t know the name,” said Magus, with an innocent air, bringing down his foot very gently upon his artist’s toes.

Moret the painter, knowing the value of Pons’ collection, had looked up suddenly at the name.  It was a move too hazardous to try with any one but Remonencq and La Cibot, but the Jew had taken the woman’s measure at sight, and his eye was as accurate as a jeweler’s scales.  It was impossible that either of the couple should know how often Magus and old Pons had matched their claws.  And, in truth, both rabid amateurs were jealous of each other.  The old Jew had never hoped for a sight of a seraglio so carefully guarded; it seemed to him that his head was swimming.  Pons’ collection was the one private collection in Paris which could vie with his own.  Pons’ idea had occurred to Magus twenty years later; but as a dealer-amateur the door of Pons’ museum had been closed to him, as for Dusommerard.  Pons and Magus had at heart the same jealousy.  Neither of them cared about the kind of celebrity dear to the ordinary collector.  And now for Elie Magus came his chance to see the poor musician’s treasures!  An amateur of beauty hiding in a boudoir or a stolen glance at a mistress concealed from him by his friend might feel as Elie Magus felt at that moment.

La Cibot was impressed by Remonencq’s respect for this singular person; real power, moreover, even when it cannot be explained, is always felt; the portress was supple and obedient, she dropped the autocratic tone which she was wont to use in her lodge and with the tenants, accepted Magus’ conditions, and agreed to admit him into Pons’ museum that very day.

So the enemy was to be brought into the citadel, and a stab dealt to Pons’ very heart.  For ten years Pons had carried his keys about with him; he had forbidden La Cibot to allow any one, no matter whom, to cross his threshold; and La Cibot had so far shared Schmucke’s opinions of bric-a-brac, that she had obeyed him.  The good Schmucke, by speaking of the splendors as “chimcracks,” and deploring his friend’s mania, had taught La Cibot to despise the old rubbish, and so secured Pons’ museum from invasion for many a long year.

When Pons took to his bed, Schmucke filled his place at the theatre and gave lessons for him at his boarding-schools.  He did his utmost to do the work of two; but Pons’ sorrows weighing heavily upon his mind, the task took all his strength.  He only saw his friend in the morning, and again at dinnertime.  His pupils and the people at the theatre, seeing the poor German look so unhappy, used to ask for news of Pons; and so great was his grief, that the indifferent would make the grimaces of sensibility which Parisians are wont to reserve for the greatest calamities.  The very springs of life had been attacked, the good German was suffering from Pons’ pain as well as from his own.  When he gave a music lesson, he spent half the time in talking of Pons, interrupting himself to wonder whether his friend felt better to-day, and the little school-girls listening heard lengthy explanations of Pons’ symptoms.  He would rush over to the Rue de Normandie in the interval between two lessons for the sake of a quarter of an hour with Pons.

When at last he saw that their common stock was almost exhausted, when Mme. Cibot (who had done her best to swell the expenses of the illness) came to him and frightened him; then the old music-master felt that he had courage of which he never thought himself capable —­courage that rose above his anguish.  For the first time in his life he set himself to earn money; money was needed at home.  One of the school-girl pupils, really touched by their troubles, asked Schmucke how he could leave his friend alone.  “Montemoiselle,” he answered, with the sublime smile of those who think no evil, “ve haf Montame Zipod, ein dreasure, montemoiselle, ein bearl!  Bons is nursed like ein brince.”

So while Schmucke trotted about the streets, La Cibot was mistress of the house and ruled the invalid.  How should Pons superintend his self-appointed guardian angel, when he had taken no solid food for a fortnight, and lay there so weak and helpless that La Cibot was obliged to lift him up and carry him to the sofa while she made the bed?

La Cibot’s visit to Elie Magus was paid (as might be expected) while Schmucke breakfasted.  She came in again just as the German was bidding his friend good-bye; for since she learned that Pons possessed a fortune, she never left the old bachelor; she brooded over him and his treasures like a hen.  From the depths of a comfortable easy-chair at the foot of the bed she poured forth for Pons’ delectation the gossip in which women of her class excel.  With Machiavelian skill, she had contrived to make Pons think that she was indispensable to him; she coaxed and she wheedled, always uneasy, always on the alert.  Mme. Fontaine’s prophecy had frightened La Cibot; she vowed to herself that she would gain her ends by kindness.  She would sleep secure on M. Pons’ legacy, but her rascality should keep within the limits of the law.  For ten years she had not suspected the value of Pons’ collection; she had a clear record behind her of ten years of devotion, honesty, and disinterestedness; it was a magnificent investment, and now she proposed to realize.  In one day, Remonencq’s hint of money had hatched the serpent’s egg, the craving for riches that had lain dormant within her for twenty years.  Since she had cherished that craving, it had grown in force with the ferment of all the evil that lurks in the corners of the heart.  How she acted upon the counsels whispered by the serpent will presently be seen.

“Well?” she asked of Schmucke, “has this cherub of ours had plenty to drink?  Is he better?”

“He is not doing fery vell, tear Montame Zipod, not fery vell,” said poor Schmucke, brushing away the tears from his eyes.

“Pooh! you make too much of it, my dear M. Schmucke; we must take things as we find them; Cibot might be at death’s door, and I should not take it to heart as you do.  Come! the cherub has a good constitution.  And he has been steady, it seems, you see; you have no idea what an age sober people live.  He is very ill, it is true, but with all the care I take of him, I shall bring him round.  Be easy, look after your affairs, I will keep him company and see that he drinks his pints of barley water.”

“Gif you vere not here, I should die of anxiety—­” said Schmucke, squeezing his kind housekeeper’s hand in both his own to express his confidence in her.

La Cibot wiped her eyes as she went back to the invalid’s room.

“What is the matter, Mme. Cibot?” asked Pons.

“It is M. Schmucke that has upset me; he is crying as if you were dead,” said she.  “If you are not well, you are not so bad yet that nobody need cry over you; but it has given me such a turn!  Oh dear! oh dear! how silly it is of me to get so fond of people, and to think more of you than of Cibot!  For, after all, you aren’t nothing to me, you are only my brother by Adam’s side; and yet, whenever you are in the question, it puts me in such a taking, upon my word it does!  I would cut off my hand—­my left hand, of course—­to see you coming and going, eating your meals, and screwing bargains out of dealers as usual.  If I had had a child of my own, I think I should have loved it as I love you, eh!  There, take a drink, dearie; come now, empty the glass.  Drink it off, monsieur, I tell you!  The first thing Dr. Poulain said was, ’If M. Pons has no mind to go to Pere Lachaise, he ought to drink as many buckets full of water in a day as an Auvergnat will sell.’  So, come now, drink—­”

“But I do drink, Cibot, my good woman; I drink and drink till I am deluged—­”

“That is right,” said the portress, as she took away the empty glass.  “That is the way to get better.  Dr. Poulain had another patient ill of your complaint; but he had nobody to look after him, his children left him to himself, and he died because he didn’t drink enough—­so you must drink, honey, you see—­he died and they buried him two months ago.  And if you were to die, you know, you would drag down old M. Schmucke with you, sir.  He is like a child.  Ah! he loves you, he does, the dear lamb of a man; no woman never loved a man like that!  He doesn’t care for meat nor drink; he has grown as thin as you are in the last fortnight, and you are nothing but skin and bones.—­It makes me jealous to see it, for I am very fond of you; but not to that degree; I haven’t lost my appetite, quite the other way; always going up and down stairs, till my legs are so tired that I drop down of an evening like a lump of lead.  Here am I neglecting my poor Cibot for you; Mlle. Remonencq cooks his victuals for him, and he goes on about it and says that nothing is right!  At that I tell him that one ought to put up with something for the sake of other people, and that you are so ill that I cannot leave you.  In the first place, you can’t afford a nurse.  And before I would have a nurse here!—­I have done for you these ten years; they want wine and sugar, and foot-warmers, and all sorts of comforts.  And they rob their patients unless the patients leave them something in their wills.  Have a nurse in here to-day, and to-morrow we should find a picture or something or other gone—­”

“Oh!  Mme. Cibot!” cried Pons, quite beside himself, “do not leave me!  No one must touch anything—­”

“I am here,” said La Cibot; “so long as I have the strength I shall be here.—­Be easy.  There was Dr. Poulain wanting to get a nurse for you; perhaps he has his eye on your treasures.  I just snubbed him, I did.  ‘The gentleman won’t have any one but me,’ I told him.  ’He is used to me, and I am used to him.’  So he said no more.  A nurse, indeed!  They are all thieves; I hate that sort of woman, I do.  Here is a tale that will show you how sly they are.  There was once an old gentleman—­it was Dr. Poulain himself, mind you, who told me this—­well, a Mme. Sabatier, a woman of thirty-six that used to sell slippers at the Palais Royal—­you remember the Galerie at the Palais that they pulled down?”

Pons nodded.

“Well, at that time she had not done very well; her husband used to drink, and died of spontaneous imbustion; but she had been a fine woman in her time, truth to tell, not that it did her any good, though she had friends among the lawyers.  So, being hard up, she became a monthly nurse, and lived in the Rue Barre-du-Bec.  Well, she went out to nurse an old gentleman that had a disease of the lurinary guts (saving your presence); they used to tap him like an artesian well, and he needed such care that she used to sleep on a truckle-bed in the same room with him.  You would hardly believe such a thing!—­’Men respect nothing,’ you’ll tell me, ‘so selfish as they are.’  Well, she used to talk with him, you understand; she never left him, she amused him, she told him stories, she drew him on to talk (just as we are chatting away together now, you and I, eh?), and she found out that his nephews—­the old gentleman had nephews—­that his nephews were wretches; they had worried him, and final end of it, they had brought on this illness.  Well, my dear sir, she saved his life, he married her, and they have a fine child; Ma’am Bordevin, the butcher’s wife in the Rue Charlot, a relative of hers, stood godmother.  There is luck for you!

“As for me, I am married; and if I have no children, I don’t mind saying that it is Cibot’s fault; he is too fond of me, but if I cared —­never mind.  What would have become of me and my Cibot if we had had a family, when we have not a penny to bless ourselves with after thirty years’ of faithful service?  I have not a farthing belonging to nobody else, that is what comforts me.  I have never wronged nobody.  —­Look here, suppose now (there is no harm in supposing when you will be out and about again in six weeks’ time, and sauntering along the boulevard); well, suppose that you had put me down in your will; very good, I shouldn’t never rest till I had found your heirs and given the money back.  Such is my horror of anything that is not earned by the sweat of my brow.

“You will say to me, ’Why, Mme. Cibot, why should you worry yourself like that?  You have fairly earned the money; you looked after your two gentlemen as if they had been your children; you saved them a thousand francs a year—­’ (for there are plenty, sir, you know, that would have had their ten thousand francs put out to interest by now if they had been in my place)—­’so if the worthy gentleman leaves you a trifle of an annuity, it is only right.’—­Suppose they told me that.  Well, now; I am not thinking of myself.—­I cannot think how some women can do a kindness thinking of themselves all the time.  It is not doing good, sir, is it?  I do not go to church myself, I haven’t the time; but my conscience tells me what is right. . . .  Don’t you fidget like that, my lamb!—­Don’t scratch yourself! . . .  Dear me, how yellow you grow!  So yellow you are—­quite brown.  How funny it is that one can come to look like a lemon in three weeks! . . .  Honesty is all that poor folk have, and one must surely have something!  Suppose that you were just at death’s door, I should be the first to tell you that you ought to leave all that you have to M. Schmucke.  It is your duty, for he is all the family you have.  He loves you, he does, as a dog loves his master.”

“Ah! yes,” said Pons; “nobody else has ever loved me all my life long—­”

“Ah! that is not kind of you, sir,” said Mme. Cibot; “then I do not love you, I suppose?”

“I do not say so, my dear Mme. Cibot.”

“Good.  You take me for a servant, do you, a common servant, as if I hadn’t no heart!  Goodness me! for eleven years you do for two old bachelors, you think of nothing but their comfort.  I have turned half a score of greengrocers’ shops upside down for you, I have talked people round to get you good Brie cheese; I have gone down as far as the market for fresh butter for you; I have taken such care of things that nothing of yours hasn’t been chipped nor broken in all these ten years; I have just treated you like my own children; and then to hear a ‘My dear Mme. Cibot,’ that shows that there is not a bit of feeling for you in the heart of an old gentleman that you have cared for like a king’s son! for the little King of Rome was not so well looked after.  He died in his prime; there is proof for you. . . .  Come, sir, you are unjust!  You are ungrateful!  It is because I am only a poor portress.  Goodness me! are you one of those that think we are dogs?—­”

“But, my dear Mme. Cibot—­”

“Indeed, you that know so much, tell me why we porters are treated like this, and are supposed to have no feelings; people look down on us in these days when they talk of Equality!—­As for me, am I not as good as another woman, I that was one of the finest women in Paris, and was called La belle Ecaillere, and received declarations seven or eight times a day?  And even now if I liked—­Look here, sir, you know that little scrubby marine store-dealer downstairs?  Very well, he would marry me any day, if I were a widow that is, with his eyes shut; he has had them looking wide open in my direction so often; he is always saying, ’Oh! what fine arms you have, Ma’am Cibot!—­I dreamed last night that it was bread and I was butter, and I was spread on the top.’  Look, sir, there is an arm!”

She rolled up her sleeve and displayed the shapeliest arm imaginable, as white and fresh as her hand was red and rough; a plump, round, dimpled arm, drawn from its merino sheath like a blade from the scabbard to dazzle Pons, who looked away.

“For every oyster the knife opened, the arm has opened a heart!  Well, it belongs to Cibot, and I did wrong when I neglected him, poor dear, HE would throw himself over a precipice at a word from me; while you, sir, that call me ‘My dear Mme. Cibot’ when I do impossible things for you—­”

“Do just listen to me,” broke in the patient; “I cannot call you my mother, nor my wife—­”

“No, never in all my born days will I take again to anybody—­”

“Do let me speak!” continued Pons.  “Let me see; I put M. Schmucke first—­”

“M.  Schmucke! there is a heart for you,” cried La Cibot.  “Ah! he loves me, but then he is poor.  It is money that deadens the heart; and you are rich!  Oh, well, take a nurse, you will see what a life she will lead you; she will torment you, you will be like a cockchafer on a string.  The doctor will say that you must have plenty to drink, and she will do nothing but feed you.  She will bring you to your grave and rob you.  You do not deserve to have a Mme. Cibot  When Dr. Poulain comes, ask him for a nurse.”

“Oh fiddlestickend!” the patient cried angrily. “Will you listen to me?  When I spoke of my friend Schmucke, I was not thinking of women.  I know quite well that no one cares for me so sincerely as you do, you and Schmucke—­”

“Have the goodness not to irritate yourself in this way!” exclaimed La Cibot, plunging down upon Pons and covering him by force with the bedclothes.

“How should I not love you?” said poor Pons.

“You love me, really? . . .  There, there, forgive me, sir!” she said, crying and wiping her eyes.  “Ah, yes, of course, you love me, as you love a servant, that is the way!—­a servant to whom you throw an annuity of six hundred francs like a crust you fling into a dog’s kennel—­”

“Oh!  Mme. Cibot,” cried Pons, “for what do you take me?  You do not know me.”

“Ah! you will care even more than that for me,” she said, meeting Pons’ eyes.  “You will love your kind old Cibot like a mother, will you not?  A mother, that is it!  I am your mother; you are both of you my children. . . .  Ah, if I only knew them that caused you this sorrow, I would do that which would bring me into the police-courts, and even to prison; I would tear their eyes out!  Such people deserve to die at the Barriere Saint-Jacques, and that is too good for such scoundrels. . . .  So kind, so good as you are (for you have a heart of gold), you were sent into the world to make some woman happy! . . .  Yes, you would have her happy, as anybody can see; you were cut out for that.  In the very beginning, when I saw how you were with M. Schmucke, I said to myself, ’M.  Pons has missed the life he was meant for; he was made to be a good husband.’  Come, now, you like women.”

“Ah, yes,” said Pons, “and no woman has been mine.”

“Really?” exclaimed La Cibot, with a provocative air as she came nearer and took Pons’ hand in hers.  “Do you not know what it is to love a woman that will do anything for her lover?  Is it possible?  If I were in your place, I should not wish to leave this world for another until I had known the greatest happiness on earth! . . .  Poor dear!  If I was now what I was once, I would leave Cibot for you! upon my word, I would!  Why, with a nose shaped like that—­for you have a fine nose —­how did you manage it, poor cherub? . . .  You will tell me that ’not every woman knows a man when she sees him’; and a pity it is that they marry so at random as they do, it makes you sorry to see it.—­Now, for my own part, I should have thought that you had had mistresses by the dozen—­dancers, actresses, and duchesses, for you went out so much. . . .  When you went out, I used to say to Cibot, ’Look! there is M. Pons going a-gallivanting,’ on my word, I did, I was so sure that women ran after you.  Heaven made you for love. . . .  Why, my dear sir, I found that out the first day that you dined at home, and you were so touched with M. Schmucke’s pleasure.  And next day M. Schmucke kept saying to me, ‘Montame Zipod, he haf tined hier,’ with the tears in his eyes, till I cried along with him like a fool, as I am.  And how sad he looked when you took to gadding abroad again and dining out!  Poor man, you never saw any one so disconsolate!  Ah! you are quite right to leave everything to him.  Dear worthy man, why he is as good as a family to you, he is!  Do not forget him; for if you do, God will not receive you into his Paradise, for those that have been ungrateful to their friends and left them no rentes will not go to heaven.”